Revealed: Bleek Hoax
It appears that the hallowed Bleek records, housed at the University of Cape Town (UCT), could be an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the German linguist, Wilhelm Bleek, aided and abetted by his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, and his daughter, Dorothea.
This bombshell was dropped at a conference on marginalised languages by Bleek’s great-grandson, Hans-Dieter Kepler, during a secret seminar on the Watson-Krog affair at UCT.
“My grandfather had a very odd, almost postmodern, sense of humour,” he said. “Lucy and he did spend time with the San prisoners as a front to their constructing a fictional language to intrigue and fool future generations of academics.”
News of this has occasionally been leaked. In Imogen Hartley’s book, Borges, Bleek and Barthes, she suggested that the joke had inspired Borges’s masterful allegory of imagination and reality, Tlon, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius.
Supporting this thesis is Lucy Lloyd’s letter to her sister, Emily, in which she referred to the San as having a wonderfully liberating scatological wit and as also being delightfully sly pranksters. None of this is evident in the UCT records.
An interesting fact is that the only person who speaks the language is Alvin J Klingman, a professor of comparative linguistics at the University of Arkansas, who is currently rendering Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters into /Xam. — Gus Ferguson, Cape Town
Monbiot doesn’t know Basarwa
I am disappointed at George Monbiot’s analysis of the Botswana Bushmen (“Who belongs to another age?” March 24).
From his criticism, it appears he has never been to the reserve in question, but chooses to discredit those who have seen for themselves the Basarwa’s living conditions.
He suggests that, as the British MPs were invited by Debswana, their views have no credibility. Can he please tell us on whose invitation they should have come? — Batsile Nwako, Gaborone
Stop using rubber stamp!
Of the seven rivers that cross the Kruger park, only one, the Sabie, continues to flow all year round. SANParks played a large part in convincing a reluctant water affairs department of the need to set aside an ecological reserve for our rivers. This happened before 1994 — so excuse me if I take Mike Muller’s criticisms of SANParks’s track record with a pinch of salt (March 24).
I am pleased to hear the department has discovered the name of the community that the Steelpoort Dam would serve. Doubtless, the department has considered the options available to supply the Nebo plateau with water before deciding that the dam is the best option. No doubt something basic, like the pipeline route to the plateau, formed part of the environmental approval — or did it?
I doubt that a decision to appeal against a decision in favour of a sister arm of government is one that SANParks would take lightly.
The environmental impact assessment process is an opportunity for resolving problems and making sure developers do their homework.
So, my advice to the one department with a spotless human rights record during apartheid is: stop the rubber-stamp approach. — Andrew Ferendinos
Trial sends out sorry message
I wish to record my utter disgust and horror at the way in which the Jacob Zuma trial defence lawyer, unrestrained by those in authority, has been questioning the rape victim.
I was proud of our judicial system in the new South Africa and am now devastated that it seems to give free rein to such cruel abuse of a victim’s dignity.
I would have thought that even in judicial language it is understood that if a woman says “no” to sex, she means “no”. What is the relevance, therefore, of her sexual history, of what she was wearing, or of the -condition of the bedding to the act of rape?
Reading and seeing on TV day after day the vicious assault the victim has had to endure in the courtroom, and the horrific intimidation outside (where precious little has been done to arrest those guilty of what I would call human rights violations), has convinced me that I would definitely not want to report and seek justice should such trauma ever befall me.
This trial sends out one message to the rape victims in our country, a country already shamed by the statistics of rapes and assaults on its people and even its children: you have no choice but to endure and keep quiet. — Ellen Potter, Smithfield
Your newspaper is anti-Zuma. You have taken a stand of not publishing articles in his defence, while you afford every political pipsqueak and dubious character like Barney Pityana the opportunity to denigrate him.
We miss balanced editors like Anton Harber of The Weekly Mail. — Lindani Gcwensa, Centurion
Woe awaits South Africa if this man is found not guilty in both cases where he has been charged and then rises to the position of president. Our country would not survive a leader displaying such a lack of insight and judgement. — Charl Cornelissen, Florida Hills
Official announcement
Dear citizens
We are sorry to
Hereby announce
Via the grapevine
Public offices are closed
Till further notice
You can meet the public servants
On NEWS AT SEVEN
And chat to them
(If you have air time)
On Asikhulume — Let’s talk
Or else catch them on air
Before they rush out of the studio
To catch the airbus to London
For a business-network opportunity
At Tony Blair’s birthday party
Five years is almost over
For you to mingle with your ever-busy representatives
At an imbizo or a ward meeting perchance held in your yard
Or even host Mr President
In your lounge-cum-bedroom-cum-kitchen
On a house-to-house visit
Two days before elections
Unless you are even more lucky
To bump into your mayor
At the party of a colleague
Who happens to keep the right company
—Mphutlane Wa Bofelo
Tips for sinking farmers
So the “poor Zimbabwean farmers” in Zambia are crying because they didn’t expect the kwacha to rise in value. They aren’t as clever as we thought!
A few suggestions:
- Get the “medem” to do the housework (a new experience, I’m sure).
- Mow the lawn yourself.
- Make do with last year’s new Benz for two or three years.
- Cancel the satellite dish.
- Home-school the kids.
- Call a non-farmer, ask about their monthly budget, and live on it.
Alternatively, you could give up farming and try something else — accounting, engineering, plumbing or selling — and live on a salary like the rest of us.
In 1997/98, when farms were ransacked, one farmer escaped in his private plane! Two weeks later an ad ran in the Financial Gazette asking for donations for farmers who were underinsured! — Anthony Brooks
DA takes city back(wards)
The Democratic Alliance has been quick to deliver on its offensive election poster promises. As architect of the bare majority voting alliance at Wednesday’s council meeting, it has indeed “taken the city back” — in time and complexion.
Two of the three top offices on the council are now held by whites. Arguably, it has also “stopped ANC racism” by excluding from the top three council offices any representative of Cape Town’s African citizens. Helen Zille as mayor will now have an even greater uphill struggle to overcome the fears of many Capetonians, so well recorded by Hazel Makhuzeni in the Mail & Guardian of March 10.
It is to the Independent Democrats’ credit that they moved beyond the infantile disorder that accompanied their initial triumph to accepting the necessity of alliances and then steadfastly voted with the ANC bloc.
This forced the DA into an open, and expensive, alliance with parties with little to offer but a negligible share of the popular vote. If merit not “race” is indeed to be the criterion for appointment, perhaps the DA would offer an explanation of its vote for these persons and the nature of their merit over that of the other candidates for the position of speaker and deputy mayor. Representivity, surely the merit requirement when constructing a democratic and inclusive city governance, cannot be seriously advanced. The rewards the DA has bestowed on the Freedom Front Plus and the African Christian Democratic Party, if the subject of competitive tender, would undoubtedly attract the united censure of auditor general and public protector.
Cape Town, a gay-friendly tourist destination, now has, courtesy of the DA, a deputy mayor from the ACDP — a party that distinguished itself as the only one of the parliamentary parties to oppose the constitutional provision of equality for people of all sexual orientations.
I challenge Zille to publicise the position of her deputy, Andrew Arnold, on equal rights for gays and lesbians. If he refuses to commit himself to the provisions of the Constitution, I ask her to sack him with the same dispatch she rightly demanded of her predecessor in the affair of the mayor’s press secretary’s racist webpage comments. Such a demonstration of principled leadership would be a positive sign at the beginning of her mayorship.
Should she feel this action might threaten her slender majority, she could always again approach the PAC, this time to reverse its abstention. — Howard Smith, Woodstock, Cape Town
Don’t ram Asgisa down our throats
The Accelerated Shared Growth Initiative (Asgisa) might be seen as holding out promising solutions to South Africa’s economic problems. But one might have said the same of Gear in 1996. With Gear, the greatest concern was lack of consultation in arriving at an economic policy. In a tripartite system like that of South Africa, consultation is paramount.
For many, the left-leaning, pro-poor African National Congress was seen as having bowed to pressure from local and international big business.
Former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz has noted the same trend elsewhere in the interaction between Third World countries and international financial organisations. He noted how small economies were forced into free-market systems against their will and interests, and how the institutions pushed for policy changes based on the idea that the problem lay “with greedy unions and politicians interfering with the workings of the free market, by demanding and getting excessively high wages”. The conclusion was that if there was unemployment, wages should be reduced.
Gear and Asgisa seem to be following the same logic. In both cases, one worries about the influence of business.
One hopes the deputy president makes good on her promise to make Asgisa a consultative and inclusive team effort with business, labour and civil society. A situation like that of Gear, which was declared “non-negotiable in its broad terms”, should be avoided. — Tennyson Mahlambi
Illogical
In last week’s editorial, you argued that there is a contradiction between the Inkatha Freedom Party’s stance on Narend Singh and the fact that it sanctions polygamy.
I fail to understand your logic. The IFP does not sanction polygamy any more than other political parties. IFP members may be poly-gamists, but the practice exists in other parties as well.
Furthermore, it is strange that Singh’s extramarital affair should be considered similar to polygamy. Polygamy is a recognised, legal form of marriage in South Africa, whereas society does not condone extramarital affairs. — Professor Tuntufye S Mwamwenda, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban